Word: flatness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most musicals, particularly those in which the score towers over the book, tend to direct themselves, given a competent cast, so it is difficult to assess what Paris Barclay has done in his Mainstage directorial debut. Many of the dialogue scenes fall flat--partly because of easily anticipated jokes and a few wooden characterizations--and by the second act the audience waits only for the next number to start. Several fine performances, though, keep this production of Company from being a skein of loosely-woven songs, the foremost among them Bonnie Lander's funny and beautifully-timed Joanne, the bitch...
Fifteen years have passed since Willem de Kooning, one of the last patriarchs of abstract expressionism, moved out of Manhattan to live and work near East Hampton, among the flat green potato fields and salty inlets of Long Island. This span of time was for him, in the jargon of art history, a "period." His manner of painting changed, becoming looser, splashier, more atmospheric than it had ever been before. The drawing loosened too, and the place supplied him with a different subject matter-a landscape of dunes and water reflections, green groves and pink bodies half eroded by light...
RATHER THAN A PLAY primarily about power, this play focuses more on relationships--and the interweaving of power, love and betrayal. Lipsky's philosophizing at the play's end about Israel's decline from Moses's cooperative tribal government to the power politics infecting David and Saul falls flat, perhaps owing to the narrator's underlining of the self-evident. Better to stick to what he does best--implying the moral of the play through well-written character confrontations--and leave Story Theater for fairy tales...
...later, Joseph Cardinal Hoffner, chairman of the bishops' conference, wrote a letter accusing Küng of evading a binding creed, and demanding in exasperation: "Is Jesus Christ the preexisting, eternal Son of God, one in being with the Father?" Because Küng continued to provide no flat answer, the hierarchy last November issued a formal warning that the book created a "distressing insecurity of faith" and charged that Küng had failed to explain how his Christology could be reconciled with the historic creeds...
...were flat the whole weekend," said Harvard coach McLaughlin. "There seemed to be something missing on Wednesday and Thursday in practice," he said. He added, "they're playing for the league title and that's an incentive...